love city

Very important to remind ourselves regularly of the reality of money. Soulographie right now needs to focus on it with cooperative delight and an open heart right now… My politics (or the language of them) changed at a ratconference in Philly a number of years back when I was going of on the glamour of spiritual poverty and a single mother stood up and said a) that her kids needed dental work and that b) she’s been asked to work for free her whole life not because of the solidarity of free love but because her work isn’t valued. The conversation has to include this. Spiritual poverty – or life prior to money – is a viable ethical realm, tactically sound and essential to evolution. But involuntary material poverty is a tactic of oppression and has to be assaulted.

More than one truth maintains. It’s all about money, but there’s enough room in “all” “about” and “money” to allow room for continued conversation even when the money isn’t there.

We know that money is insufficient; it needs something to attach to, and that thing isn’t necessarily quality, and it isn’t personal. There are, everywhere, artistic products and processes that are wildly unhappy and flagrantly, well, bad, that have lots of money in and from them. Money represents not quality but value – that which we socially value (and society can value all kinds of things – murder in the name of bias, for example, as well as health, mercy, etc.).

Money needs to indicate the location of a society’s values in the way that a map indicates the presence of a country (it isn’t the country, but shows it) or the ways the laws of gravity (and their unavoidable place in our conduct) express the reality of gravity without being gravity.

Lacking money, one can ask for it, and get it or not. One can try and get ahead of it by asking money what it wants – this sometimes works (repeating the boss’ language back as a way to sound sharp)… but what it wants is our want; as language it is very basic – binary: I have/I want in perpetual flicker. Then one can cause appetite or define possession on behalf of an audience – we can try to get ahead of the audience by asking it what it wants – this sometimes works… Theater can be the horizon line between money and audience, a horizon or membrane. Theater can thin itself, a sensitive sheet of nerves alert to the motions of capital and its market. The thinner it is, the more it is seen by either side as a technology for interface – a means of transfer, a way of communicating between money and market, as entertainment (not a site for ideas, not a geography in which an audience, which is welcome, or money, which is welcome, can rest and acquire new self-definitions).

Or, lacking money, one can become that which money needs – theater can become the audience, can help the audience ask its questions, and the questions (not the answers) take the form of performance. Money comes to the performance as a co-creator in acts of mutual self-definition (what do we value and how doe we value it? what else do we value and how else do we value it?).

In non-solo-charismatic, non-pyramidal theater structures/economic structures/political structures, event is built from foundation up. It’s interesting that the dollar bill has a gap between the all-seeing peak of the pyramid and the body of the structure. This seems accurate to the current system, and – less realistic, in a way. Custom asks us to guess at ways to jump from who we are to the concentrated resource – they are estranged. There are ways we can see, can concentrate at the level of the planet versus the abstract, severed idea?

It’s all about money. It truly is. And it’s all about desire. And it’s all about the bed/basis/fuel for desire; its’ all about capacity (that which the fuel stores); it’s all about peace (the time and stillness that accumulates capacity). It’s all about being still, together… this is precisely as logical as its mirror formulation.